February 2016

How do you earn the trust of someone you’ve just met? It’s a question salespeople have been asking for ages. One way is though product knowledge. If you deliver product knowledge with conviction and deep belief, you’re likely to earn customer trust. Even if the information is wrong, if well delivered, it can come off as believable. This approach is rooted in “learning.” Teachers are trusted, salespeople are not. Salespeople are viewed as trying to make a buck. Off you. When I am in a selling situation and I hear words come out of my mouth that sound like selling, I know I’m toast. Hell, I wouldn’t buy from me.

Another way to earn trust is through humor. I know, I know, the two seem strange bedfellows. But humor creates and accelerates likability which is a precursor to trust. Humor doesn’t set the hook, but it puts the hook right in front of the customer’s mouth. Humor is a positive psychosocial phenomenon and does not evoke fight or flight.

A salesperson with a good measure of humor capped off by strong product knowledge is in a good position to facilitate commerce. Notice I didn’t say sell. Hee hee.

There are many ways to make money in marketing. Sergio Zyman, ex-Coke CMO recites a few “Sell more, more times, to more people, at higher prices.” Elegant, no? I work with a kitchen remodeling company Kitchen Magic, owner of a smart business model. Without going into the secret sauce, let me just say they manufacture a good product, offer smart advice, install it well and quickly, and offer a warranty that outlasts the tastes of its customers.

One of Mr. Zyman’s ways to increase sales is to sell “more times.” In the kitchen remodeling business, data exists that says how long a typical kitchen goes before it’s redone; let’s say that number is 16 years. A way for a remodeling company to increase sales would be to accelerate that timeframe. If they can cut it in half that would certainly have a positive impact. So how do you accelerate the remodeling timeframe? Or how do you get people to buy a new car every 4 years rather than 6 years? How do you sell more times, or more often? You change your marketing arc. This is not done through a loyalty program, it’s done with deep dish marketing thinking. “Sell more” is one of the many marketing questions we all need to think about…more.

I was reading some data points about mobile usage this morning (source Yahoo’s Simon Khalaf) and learned that 280 million people worldwide check their mobile phones over 60 times a day? Did you also know the average American spends 4 hours and 11 minutes on his or her phone daily?

Of all that time, how much of it is nourishing to the body and soul, I wonder? If I were to guess 10%, would I be in the ballpark?

Health and fitness apps are nourishing one can presume. News and analysis also good. Thoughtful and heartfelt communications qualify. Music can be nourishing and certainly educational podcasts. But goofy videos, comedic cartoons, flaccid Facebook posts and hours of Candy Crush? I don’t think so.

Was I an investor in start-ups, I’d be on the lookout for mobile nourishment apps. Once we flip the percentages from 90% fluff to 10% fluff we may actually reduce overall time on phones, too. Bad news for the mobile carriers. Good news for people.

Data is the new content. With IBM’s $2.6B investment in Truven Health Analytics, we are seeing the beginnings of a massive bet on the data business. IBM has always made its paycheck with data processing hardware and consulting. Sure they’ve sold software but in this age of cloud computing, where software will kinda go away, IBM seems to be appreciating that data ownership is the ticket. Watson Health (into which Truven will be folded) is more than big iron and a log-in, it will be a repository of data that will make a manifold improvement in the quality of health worldwide.

The Obama administration has pushed for EMRs (electronic medical records), which was a brilliant first step. But as is the way in free enterprise societies there are now 70-ish EMRs available, most of which don’t talk to one another. Where’s the big data “learn” from that? Truven Heatlh Analytics owns treatment data from 200 million patients. Data. Not sequestered software records. This is an analytics mother lode. This is Google scale stuff — but with a mission that goes way beyond Ad Words revenue. We’re talking “saving lives and transforming care” here.

IBM and Watson are not washing their hands of big iron and consulting, but they are def getting into the data business — in a low hanging fruit sector. Watch out Google. Watch out.

“Apple’s emerging global brand is privacy,” is a statement Farhad Manjoo made in his cover story in today’s New York Times. As someone with access to Tim Cook, Mr. Manjoo has a leg up on me when it comes to statements like this about brand, but this one caught me by surprise. There is an interesting video I watched recently by NYU’s Scott Galloway, in which he shares brand ideas of the top tech brands in the land (Google, Amazon, and Facebook). He smartly pointed out that it’s hard to articulate the Apple brand idea. Using my framework for brand strategy, which is “one idea, three proof planks,” I have to agree with Mr. Galloway. In all my studies and hypotheses of and about the Apple brand I can tell you privacy isn’t a plank I would come up with. That’s not to say it’s not possible, it just feels a little off-piste. A little “of the moment.”

So when Farhah Manjoo, bandies about the “p” word in a branding context, in the midst of Apple’s kerfuffle with the U.S. government, I think he’s either taking some license or Mr. Cook is playing fast and loose with the brand.

One of the coolest things I get to do as a brand planner is sit back and watch a company or product transform after a new brand strategy is presented. The word viral would be an overstatement, because “one claim and three proof planks” aren’t quickly acculturated into a company. When properly sold in, however, and that means well beyond the marketing department, a brand strategy can take hold fairly quickly. It will alter the work of the SEO team — all of a sudden new key words begin to pop in as traffic drivers. Company language in meetings tilts in a slightly new direction. And once a company language changes it’s not long before partner and consumers language follow.

The day after I present final brand strategy, I’m checking the website to see if anyone has made changes to the home page. Week two I’m checking new videos to see if the company Is-Does has morphed. I look to newly minteed press releases for changes to the first sentence and the “About” paragraph. My expectation is that things will change immediately. (Doe-eyed Poppe.)

Strategy work is a lot less requited than design work. When a new logo and tagline hits the street, it’s easily seen. It’s fast and obvious. But when a brand strategy hits, it’s often a slow creep. That doesn’t keep me from checking right away. Hee hee.

According to the NYT today, the definition of black holes is “the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape.” Leave it to the Times to put something so complex into human terms. Einstein, when talking about the geometry of the universe likened it to a bed mattress, which only moves and reacts when a sleeper moves. It’s shape distorting with the movement of matter an energy. So basically, there are still some things that are quite hard to explain. And that’s brings me to branding.

Ask 100 people about branding and you’ll get 80 answers. From “branding is an empty vessel into which you pour meaning?,” a favorite of mine, to “”the process of creating a relationship or a connection between a company’s product and emotional perception of the customer for the purpose of generating segregation among competition and building loyalty among customers,” which is straight out of Wikipedia (did I say straight?).

Branding today is marketing’s black hole. Everyone is talking about is, everyone is doing it, everyone thinks they know what it is, but few can articulate it. For all the frameworks brand experts have developed and all the webinars and presentation on the topic, few have been able to boil it down. To a simple algorithm. Or formula.

The framework used by What’s The Idea? is one such…and it works. At the top of the framework is a brand claim. A claim of value; something customer wants and something the brand delivers. Every brand then needs proof for that claim. I use 3 proof planks for my framework. The theory of three.

If you have a claim and proof array and you demonstrate it every day, you are brand building. You are branding.

Debt refers to a withdrawal of equity. Brand debt occurs when marketers are not putting equity into a brand. Fare sale ads are generators of brand debt. In an active and competitive marketing world, stasis or standing still while competitors are creating brand value also creates brand debt. Think shark analogy. It is the job of brand managers to make deposits in the brand bank. Daily acts that make brands stronger.

But it’s not enough to make multiple random deposits; one must make exacting, strategic deposits. A prospect said to me yesterday she thought my “three proof plank” approach to organizing these so-called deposits was “formulaic.” And potentially limiting. My response? More than 3 planks dilutes the collective message. The collective experience.

I have a slide in my presentation on the “Fruit Cocktail Effect.” It states that if you try to be too many things you end up being none. In fruit cocktail the peach tastes like the pear, which tastes like the cherries and grapes…and so on. The result is that you are building with too many materials and detracting from “the build.” You have to feel the build.

I love the Marmot brand. I ski in Marmot, I sleep in Marmot, I do outdoors stuff in Marmot. I want to own more of it. The gear is well-designed, engineered-to-the-max and good looking. They’ve done a wonderful job with branding and marketing. (I have tend pole that bent, and it doesn’t even bother me. Why? Because Marmot is like family.)

Then, before the Super Bowl, I saw a Marmot teaser ad campaign and knew I wasn’t going to like. Super Sunday I saw the real thing. It’s a Goodby, Silverstein and Partners spot, focusing around, you guessed it, a marmot. Were this toilet tissue or insurance, maybe. But cuddly talking Marmot? Oy. I can only imagine the 2 other campaigns the agency pitched to beat this one. It should never have been presented. Lazy ass trade craft. It is so unfitting of the brand.

I can just imagine the engineers in the goose down research center, breathing feathers all day, watching the game on TV with their friends. “A talking marmot, really?” No wonder advertising and marketing people have a bad name in engineering focused companies.

As a brand strategy guy and Marmot fan it was a sad day. Even if the spot tested off the charts with the teens and tweens – the next generation of buyers – it was a brand mistake. A 5 million dollar mistake. And that’s a lot of feathers.

Recent Articles

I love Christopher Walken. I’m beginning to appreciate Justin Timberlake. And I’m a huge fan of healthier-for-you foods. Brands are my thing and as an ad rat, my senses are heightened during the Super Bowl. All of these things converged during the Super Bowl of 2017 with the fruit drink spot featuring Messrs. Walken and […]

It has been a while since I watched my technology hero Robert Scoble on a video. He disappeared for a while, doing some Augmented Reality work, writing a book and living his “real world” life. Also he somewhat replaced Scobleizer.com with posts to Facebook. Anyway, I received an email from him today promoting a newsletter […]

I’m not sure when it happened, but at some time during brand planning career I began looking at assignments with the glass half full. Prior, there were a number of categories I walked into and start to twitch. “How am I going to learn this stuff? It’s too complicated. It’s dense and unappealing. Healthcare was […]

My friend, Roy Elvove is EVP Worldwide Communications at arguably the best ad agency in the world, BBDO. But to meet “Doc,” as his wife and friends call him, you’d never know he holds such a lofty job. He has worked at BBDO since 1999 and never, ever taken the spotlight off of BBDO, it’s executives, […]

I was a judge yesterday in the Griffin Farley Beautiful Minds completion. Mr. Farley was a BBH strategist who succumbed to cancer at way-too-early an age. The competition, and he would, likely, never have used the word competition, is a legacy built upon his nurturing of young planners. Clearly a beloved man. The showcase reminded […]

In 1974 JWT London’s Stephen King wrote a Planning Guide. Thanks to Julian Cole of Bee Bee Do (BBDO) for sharing it today. The JPEG below summarizes nicely how a brand works, based upon Mr. King’s constellation of “appeals.” This is a smart boil-down of what a brand is, why it works, and what it needs […]

If you read the previous What’s The Idea? post you’ll know I’m thinking about building an implementation phase into my brand planning engagement process. The idea is to become a brand supervisor at the client company for a couple of months to manage adherence. This, I know, is likely to go poorly unless handled with […]